


Avidity

by leradny



Category: Young Justice (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Five Times, lots of near death experiences, traught - Freeform, typical vigilante life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-05
Updated: 2018-08-05
Packaged: 2019-06-22 02:38:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15571839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/leradny/pseuds/leradny
Summary: Worst case scenario: The mine shaft in front of them collapses, too.(Or, "Five times Dick and Artemis almost kissed and one time they did." Repost from Tumblr.)





	Avidity

**1) gravity**

The grapple line’s breaking point is 500 lbs. Robin weighs 120 with added 40 for gear and armor, Artemis 160 with added 20; combined weight 340. Falling speed is the major source of concern. They stretch the cable to its limits with an ominous creak. As their momentum slowly bleeds off, Robin’s tension dissipates as well.

He smiles as Artemis’ hair dangles–upwards like a flame, according to his vision. “So, Artemis. I guess we’ve got no choice but to–”

“Don’t,” Artemis warns him. Contrary to her tone, she’s gripping Robin’s upper arms and her eyes are wide. Vaguely, he notices that her preparation is more thorough than it was when she first joined the team. First, the rebreather. Now, her quiver remains full while upside down.

“ _Hang out_ together.”

Her abdomen tightens, resisting laughter in about the same way that Robin resists panic. The momentum, slight as it is, causes them to swing further, then closer, ad nauseum until they are elbows apart. For a moment, their eyes catch, and the grip on Robin’s arms fades away so the distance between them shrinks. Is Robin leaning in? Is Artemis? Is it simply gravity realigning their bodies? (He can insist on the last one as an excuse. Artemis has a larger personal space bubble than usual.)

Robin doesn’t notice the line fraying until the last thread pops apart.

Before he can get his grapple gun out, Artemis shoots a line to a building and now Robin is the one holding on.

\- - -

**2) proximity**

Robin takes a deep breath and shakes his head. Relaxes his grip on the sheaf of files.

Motion in front: self in mirrored elevator door, no threat. Observations: Hair plastered to forehead. Possible hindrance. With a free hand, Robin clears it away from his eyes. Blood coming from mouth; split lip from landed punch. Robin dabs at his mouth with the same empty hand. Blood has coagulated and remains painful, obvious (painfully obvious). Divert questions if asked.

Forty seconds till rooftop.

Comm-link buzzes. “Kaldur to Robin. Report.”

“The classified information has been forcibly unclassified by yours truly. Heading to the rooftop.”

“Good.” A pause. “I would say something about how this is the first mission which has remained, for the most part, covert, but…”

“You’d jinx it?” Robin laughs. (Ignore pain.) “That’d do the trick.”

Twenty seconds. Ten seconds. Elevator doors slide away. Two silhouettes. Average height, lean, light clothing, light hair, compound bow: Artemis. Short, fuller proportions, heavy coat, dark hair, no weapons: Zatanna. Must keep vigilante and civilian identities separate. Smile.

Mouth has begun swelling. Smiling is painful.

“Eve'i'g.”

Artemis puts her hands on her hips. “You look like hell, Boy Wonder.”

“Sounds like it, too,” Zatanna says.

“It’s just a ‘usted lih, Arte'is.” Explosive consonants, also painful. “Ow.”

Zatanna takes the files and pats Robin on the shoulder. “Come on, Robin, mission’s over.”

“I think his eye’s puffing up too.” Artemis peers at the mask. “What, that three-inch strip of whatever doesn’t protect you from that?”

Back at base, Artemis motions for Robin to follow her, and his muscles are too limp to swerve in another direction. Arriving in the kitchen instead of the med ward, she rummages in the freezer and mutters something. “The ice pack’s drifting somewhere… Probably in my room. Sorry about that.” She takes out the ice cube tray, cracking some of them into a ziploc bag. “Sit here.”

Robin hops onto the counter. Artemis holds his shoulder and sets the ice on his mouth. A little uncharacteristic. Every now and then, she takes the pack off Robin’s face to monitor the swelling, then turns it to the other side for his eye, which she also checks. Robin knows that Artemis knows proper first aid, seeing as everyone was trained in the basics. But she seems more comfortable with the slapdash icepack.

With the boost from the counter, they are about eye level. Their combined temperatures melt the ice on the surface, allowing condensation to collect on the plastic in a very short time. The bag slips out of Artemis’ hand.

Without thinking, Robin leans forward to grab the pack, along with Artemis’ wrist. Said archer looks up at the touch, then starts away, then pauses with their faces still close to each other. Which is a bit odd considering how Artemis dislikes both personal questions and physical proximity.

They remain fixed in their relative spaces until the bag slips further. Robin slouches forward, instead of doing the reasonable thing and straightening up, and the pretense of holding the ice pack to his face is null considering how it’s dropped below his chin.

Then Kaldur opens the door.

On instinct, Robin coils his torso back upwards in a smooth motion and plucks the ice bag out of Artemis’ hand. “Fankz, Arte'is.” His mouth is now swollen and numb. It might be a good thing that he hadn’t leaned any further.

\- - -

**3) lucidity**

Robin only means to surprise people with entrances about 50% of the time. Almost as soon as he could walk, he was trained to keep it quiet for the stage, which then progressed to light running, dancing, and jumping. With stealth training on top of that, it’s more of an effort to make sounds rather than suppress them. He sets the heel of his hand on the door of the living room, slightly ajar, and shifts it open a crack.

“Yo, Kaldur? Have you ever had a lucid dream?”

Robin stops, just before the movement becomes too big to remain unnoticed.

“You will have to inform me on what 'lucid’ means, Wally.”

“It means that you can control the dream.” Actually, lucidity means 'awareness’. “Like if you could do anything, with no restriction on money or physics or whatever, what would you do?”

Kaldur coughs something polite. Robin takes advantage of their distraction to head back out into the hallway, unnoticed and reeling. Logically, he knows that rubbing his eyes will not remove the sight of empty trapezes. He’d have to go to the vision center of his brain and cease all activity there. Temporary blindness is nothing he wasn’t trained to handle as a nocturnal vigilante–

“You okay?”

Suprisingly, it’s not M'gann, or Zatanna, or even Raquel. The words come from Artemis, leaning against the wall with crossed arms, studying the opposite side. Or pretending to.

“I have these dreams sometimes. People I couldn’t save. A counselor told me lucid dreaming might help.”

“Who couldn’t you save?” Trying to word things in a manner which informs Artemis and preserves his identity wastes time, which Artemis uses to deduce the reason for his pause. “Never mind. Probably something to do with your secret identity.”

Artemis doesn’t leave, though. She slides along the wall until their shoulders touch. Robin looks up at the base of her ponytail. He can say 'Yes’. He can say 'My parents’. He can say nothing.

Or he can realize that he’s spent so much time trying to think of ways to salvage the conversation that he wasn’t paying attention to what Artemis said, and ask, “Sorry, what?”

“I said–”

Artemis turns towards him with a sigh, and the remnant of her exhale fans across Robin’s cheek. Her eyes are the color of Gotham dawn from this distance. No, moonlight–of course. Goddess of wild things, archery, and the moon. A faint smear of fog or smog or plain old clouds is always veiling the moon in the city. It tends to gray more often than the pearl white.

By the time Robin has remembered that he is waiting for Artemis to continue, Artemis looks like she has stopped talking. Instead, her weight is tipping forward and down.

Until Wally and Kaldur walk out of the room, laughing and smiling respectively.

\- - -

**4) birthday**

“Your birthday, huh?” Artemis holds an arm out and beckons with one hand. “Come here. Might as well get it over with. I’m the only girl you haven’t kissed, I think.”

Actually he hasn’t kissed M'gann, and he wasn’t really intending to kiss Artemis. But, as the lady insists, Dick walks over.

When he gets about two steps away from Artemis, he notices her arm curling back. But momentum and surprise get the better of Dick, and Artemis lands the punch. Yes, it was on his forearm instead of his shoulder or chest, but those parts of his suit are armored, at least.

Amidst applause from the rest of the team, Wally doubles over. “I never thought I’d see the day! She got you, bro!”

“Come to think of it,” Nightwing accepts his defeat with a half-laugh, because what else is he supposed to do? “You never said you’d kiss me, so I guess I…”

“Walked right into my fist?” Artemis dusts said fist off. “Yup.”

Then Wally is next to him. “I respect Artemis’ chutzpah, man, but I also feel really bad for you, so–” He grabs Nightwing around the waist and pulls him in.

\- - -

**5) viscosity**

Thanks to the rainy season of Malaysia, there is little difference between the humid air and the warm summer rain spattering onto them.

Thanks to their lack of umbrellas, no one gives a second glance to the couple, disguised as vigilantes disguised as young business people, hurrying through the crowd. Their uniforms are water-repellant, but the civilian clothes over said uniforms are slowly weighing down on them. The rudeness from Artemis is authentic and makes them even less likely to be noticed.

Artemis ducks under the awning of an empty bus stop and she pretends to study the schedule. “You think we lost him?” she asks, in Vietnamese.

Dick is about to respond in Vietnamese when a woman arrives, snapping her umbrella shut. She flicks the water off, looks at the wet bench, and chooses to remain standing.

Artemis chooses to sit, with a squelch and a frustrated hand through her frizzing hair. She pretends she is not aware of the lady. “I mean, I might not like my sister’s husband, but I’m starting to regret not taking my umbrella.”

Sitting down, close enough for his elbow to touch her ribs, Dick plays along. Piquing a casual interest by seeming absorbed in mild drama is better than looking furtive.

“He’s a good guy when he’s not being…”

“Himself,” Artemis says. She draws her hand across her lap, to lay a message in Morse code on his forearm. But the viscosity throughout Dick’s jacket and dress shirt blur the dots and dashes together. The tactile equivalent of slurred words or runny ink.

“He’s nice to your niece, isn’t he?” Dick takes her hand and taps, 'repeat’.

Artemis frowns. “And how would you know that?” 'Pursuer lost 15 min ago?’

“He’s been my friend for years.” 'Uncertain. Take bus?’ “He does talk to me sometimes.”

“Right.” Artemis leans on him. Dick pretends he is feeling human warmth rather than the insulated bodysuit. Artemis is likely pretending the same thing. “We are taking the next bus. I don’t care if we have to switch.”

Anything they feel which remotely resembles warmth is from the environment. Their insulated suits keep body temperature from falling or rising too much, at the cost of feeling perpetually clammy on the outside. Since their hands and faces are bare, heat flushes out of their palms. But,Artemis’ hair is warm, too. Soaked with tropical rain, it lies loose down her back. Dick slides a hand under it and Artemis looks up at him with a furrowed brow of confusion and uncertainty–which means, he’s crossed a line.

“Sorry to interrupt,” says the lady, in accented but fluent Vietnamese.

They start away from each other and Dick realizes that he has done worse than simply crossing a line, because his surprise is genuine. Where did his training go? He’s not supposed to forget that someone else is right there, listening to them.

“The next bus just turned the corner.”

“Um, thank you, ma'am,” Dick says. Because what else is he supposed to say?

Artemis gets up, flicking her hair over her shoulder and wringing it out.

\- - -

**6) subluminary**

Worst case scenario: The mine shaft in front of them collapses, too.

Which is exactly what happens.

The resulting air pocket is a space where they can stand, but not see each other, and they cannot hear anything outside. Even night vision goggles need existing light, if far less of it than the standard human night vision, so Dick’s mask is useless in the true darkness of the subluminary world. Artemis paces, then yells, then bites her tongue. She radios the team with tight, whispered coordinates.

A minute passes in silence.

Dick’s computer has a battery, and he doesn’t want to waste energy using it as a glorified flashlight or a calculator. Or a wrist watch. He counts his heartbeats, attempting to keep the pace moderate as he does math in his head.

> _Air volume of a roughly 10x10x10 space: 1000 cubic feet of air._
> 
> _Average person requires 350 cubic feet of air per twelve hours._
> 
> _Halved to account for two people._

They will be able to survive roughly six hours without massive exertion. Massive exertion, such as attempting to dig out of the shaft with their bare hands and lack of superpowers. Or the stress of panicking.

\- - -

An hour passes in silence.

\- - -

The radio crackles. “Don’t worry.”

“M'gann?”

“We’re coming to get you, Artemis.”

Artemis turns the radio off after a short response.

\- - -

Another hour.

\- - -

Dick had always figured that the odds of him dying in the dark were at least 75%, before he joined the Bludhaven PD. That lowered his chances to 50%. However, he can’t decide whether he’s grateful or guilty that Artemis is with him.

“We’ve got, what?” Artemis’ voice rasps. “An hour?”

“Two,” Nightwing says. Judging from how his head is beginning to spasm, he’d made a slight overestimation. But maybe he should have gone along with Artemis’ underestimation. They were both wrong, but the plus side of Artemis’ pessimism results in slightly less disappointment and fatality.

“Now that we’re going to die,” Artemis says. “I’ve decided I don’t want my last words to be something stupid like 'hurry up please’ or whatever. You got any burning things to get off your chest? I mean, related to me… or something I’ve done… or whatever.”

In the vision center of his brain, he remembers the bright stone walls of Gotham Academy.

We’re going to laugh about-–

“You’re a nice guy,” Artemis says. Is it a symptom of carbon dioxide poisoning, that Artemis is beginning to ramble? Or is it simply their impending death? “God, you don’t deserve to die this way. Not buried alive.”

“You don’t deserve to die this way, either.”

She continues on her former track without really answering. “I’ve been meaning to tell you this for a while, but stupid things like school and being on the other side of the country got in the way, and then suddenly five years are gone and you’re not the same person you were when I joined the team.”

He decides to let her finish.

“Nightwing, I never have to feel bad about being a criminal, or putting the job first when I’m with you, and that’s just–you’re a really great person.” She takes a deep breath. Gravel shifts–-a scramble due to either slipping, or losing balance, which is another possible symptom of poisoning. Nightwing attempts to discern where she’s slipped. “Okay. Your turn. I’m sorry, I went on too long.”

“We’ll laugh about this someday.”

Worst case scenario: Artemis doesn’t remember, and he has no time or breath to explain.

“Prove it.”

Nightwing holds out his wrist and pulls up the picture. Underneath Artemis’ orange mask, her eyes are wide.

“That was-– _you?!_ ”

She bursts out laughing. Which is, possibly, even worse than the previous worst case scenario because she’s using up more air than she would with normal breathing. Dick resists laughing with her and steps, with as little effort as possible, in the direction where he remembered seeing her vague shimmering outline. “Artemis–”

A sound of rock and earth shaking.

“Nightwing?” The loosening dirt brought some air back into the shaft, but Artemis’ breathing is still heavy and her voice thin. The crunches of gravelly footsteps become sloppier and closer. “Dick?”

Dick sweeps an arm out and knocks into Artemis’ elbow. She grabs his arm, and her hands scrabble across his back with adrenaline strength, up into the sweaty tangles of hair at the base of his skull. The resulting kiss is laced with dizziness and fear. As the sounds get louder, they instinctively move to one of the intact support beams even though logic states that it will buy them a few seconds at most in the case of a complete cave in.

Except, they haven’t suffocated yet and there aren’t any rocks falling at all.

Dick looks up as rays of light begin to crack through the wall of debris in the exit side of the tunnel. “That–doesn’t sound like–it’s caving _in_ –”

With one final haul, the rubble is tossed away and a rush of air and light burst through.

The team is huddled around the frame of the mine-shaft, still in lifting position. Zatanna has her hand stretched out, and her grin shows in stark relief against the blinding light she’s providing. Rocket is most likely reinforcing the tunnel. Batgirl is there, probably because she planned the effort, but she is surprised at Nightwing’s presence. Miss Martian has her hands over Garfield’s eyes. He is a badger, sitting on his sister’s shoulder.

That would be enough humiliation if there wasn’t ( _why?!_ ) every single heavy hitter of the Justice League present, too. Martian Manhunter (averting his gaze), Green Arrow (clutching his sides), Superman (trying to remain neutral), Wonder Woman (grinning), and Batman (neutral).

“So, Tigress. We, um…” M'gann clears her throat, and Garfield jumps off her shoulder to change back into a boy. “We called the League because we didn’t want you to die for real this time. I get that you didn’t want to talk too much, but… we would have tried harder–I mean, we were already trying our best, but–if we’d known Nightwing was… here… with you–”

“Can you–-rebury us-–please?” Artemis asks.

“Oxygen,” Batman says. “They’re delirious.”

Wonder Woman pulls a tank out. Nightwing prepares himself for jokes about sharing, before Batman withdraws a smaller but completely separate tank from behind his back.

“How… did you know… I was here?” Nightwing asks.

All Batman does in response is take hold of his shoulder, firmly seal the oxygen mask around Dick’s mouth, and draw the elastic band to the back of his skull. Then Nightwing finds himself in a fireman’s carry over his father’s black-clad shoulders.

“Green Arrow,” Black Canary says. “If you open your mouth, I will open  _my_  mouth, and you will not like it in this enclosed and unstable space.”

“That’s… a good idea.” Artemis fumbles with her mask and fails to shake off Wonder Woman’s help. “I was… prepared to die… and everything.”

“You don’t really mean that,” Wonder Woman says.

Green Arrow insists that he would like to rescue his former sidekick and niece in law, if Batman got to rescue Nightwing. Once that’s settled by Wonder Woman picking Artemis up instead, the rescue team makes way to the surface with all possible haste, and varying levels of awkward silence.

Once Zatanna, Rocket, and Batgirl start laughing, Nightwing pretends to be unconscious.

**Author's Note:**

> i'm just reposting all my favorite traught fanfic from tumblr onto here while i write the next chapter of 'beyond your command'. it might be a while but it's coming, i promise.


End file.
